


Semper Coitio

by inlovewithnight



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-10-19
Updated: 2006-10-19
Packaged: 2017-10-15 21:42:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,615
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/165208
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inlovewithnight/pseuds/inlovewithnight





	Semper Coitio

She's the one who found the damn rock.

Racetrack can never forget that, and never quite forgive herself for it. She frakked up the jump to Caprica (or maybe Skulls did, but she was the pilot, and in the end she made the call to jump; she's Fleet through and through and that means she takes responsibility for her frakking actions) and she found it. If she hadn't, none of this would've happened and humanity wouldn't have gone straight to hell.

The Raptor hangs there in space, watching that godsforsaken rock spin in empty blackness. They're in a nice unobtrusive orbit; nothing's going to find them but the signals from some ex-Fleeter who knows what to look for. Signals that aren't coming, aren't hacking their way out of the Cylon-occupied settlement and getting things rolling toward giving the toasters some of their own back. Maybe there's nobody left to send them. Maybe the Cylons killed all of the Fleeters and there's nobody left but the civvies who don't get it, don't realize that the Fleet has some frakking honor and won't abandon them all to die.

Then again, why should they believe that? Most of the Fleet did cut and run, frakked their oaths and went planetside. Left their birds to rust and die on the Galactica and Pegasus hangar decks. Left the Battlestars themselves to grind along too-quiet and dead inside.

"Balls," Skulls says laconically from back at the ECO seat. "Balls across the board. Zeroes. No signal."

"Let's go home," she says, looking away from the stupid planet to her console. She thinks of New Caprica as hers, in a way, her ugly little kid who's grown up wrong and turned bad on her. She can't even ship it off to the Fleet to be put straight like her folks did with her. _Just nuke it and move on._

 _This is exactly why it's a damn good thing I'm not a mother to anything more alive than that rock._

She watches it spin for a shift every day and then jumps back to the big ship that's the last place she's ever going to call home, where everything's dying that isn't too mean or stubborn to hold on.  
**  
"Stubborn, mean, or too damn ugly to breed," Dogmeat corrects her, when she's drunk enough to share what's on her mind with everyone in the rec room. Everyone--all five of them. Frak, she actually misses Starbuck's drunken ranting and loaded card games these days.

"Which one am I?" she asks, giving him his setup. He wants it and he ought to have it; he has to go back to Pegasus at shift's end and something's wrong over there, something's gone sour and bad. Everybody knows it, even if nobody on Galactica knows exactly what _it_ is. Peg crew keeps their mouths shut on the issue, stone loyal to their brass like they should be. She's pretty sure she doesn't _want_ to know anyway. She's got a hunch and that's bad enough.

"Ugly," Dogmeat says with a grin.

"Mean," Skulls corrects, shaking his head. "Stone-cold bitch, our Maggie."

"I'd say stubborn," Cooper says, the last of their Marines. He gets in the pilots' rec out of pity and, Racetrack suspects, because he's frakking Kat. Nobody gives a shit about that anymore.

"You three are frakking useless," she says, and kills her drink. "CAG breaks the tie."

Kat doesn't look up from her paperwork, over in the far corner. Racetrack doesn't know why she bothers; putting together a CAP from a skeleton crew isn't all that hard. Everybody gets a shift a day, end of story. "Mean. Skulls is right, Edmondson, you're a bitch."

"CAG's word is law," Racetrack drawls, slumping lower in her chair.

"That's right." Kat twirls her pen and scowls at the paper. "Hey, Dogmeat, when you get back to the Beast, pass word up and see if you can get an extra Viper on patrol from your wing tomorrow? I'd like to put 307 in for overhaul."

"Sure thing." Dogmeat squints at the clock. "I'm headed back in ten minutes. Probably have an answer within the hour."

"Talk to Dualla," Kat says, finally looking up. "Don't bother with the Commander."

Racetrack swears she can feel the temperature in the rec drop five degrees. "Kat."

"Don't look at me like that, either of you. Frak, why do we have to tiptoe around it? Everybody knows it. Frakking deal, you bunch of babies." She tosses her pen down and Racetrack bites back a sigh. Kat never gets a good fight anymore, since she got rank. Doesn't mean she doesn't go looking for them. "Commander Adama's not worth the title and hasn't been for how frakking long now?"

"Watch it, Kat," Dogmeat says, warning in his voice, and Racetrack bites down on her tongue. That pulled the trigger.

"I think you mean watch it, _sir_ ," Kat snaps. "I don't know if they cut out his balls or his brain, but Lee--"

"It was his heart," Cooper says, and they all turn to stare at him. "When they took him out of his Viper. Cut his heart out." He reddens a little, shrugs and sips his drink. "What? You people and your planes, it's just a theory."

"We've got a godsdamned poet in our midst," Kat says with sarcasm thick enough to cut. "Well, thank you, Bard of Picon."

"Kat," Racetrack says, and just for good measure, "sir. The Commander's the Commander. Not our place to second-guess."

"We're on the Admiral's ship right now, and off-frakking-duty." Gods, Kat _does_ want a fight, and Racetrack isn't sure who's going to throw the first punch, Dogmeat or Kat or hell, Racetrack herself, because she can't _stand_ when Kat gets this way. "And if the _Commander_ has turned into a whining, useless, jelly-roll little--"

"He _stayed_ ," Skulls says flatly, with the tone that means that's the end of it and shut the hell up, sir. "Drop it, Kat."

"Yeah," Racetrack says, and one of the veins pulsing in Dogmeat's forehead slows down a little. "He could've resigned his commission and gone planetside with everybody else. Starbuck and the Chief and everyfrakkingbody. He stayed. He's one of us, Kat. Drop it."

"He only stayed _because_ Starbuck went and you know it! You _all_ know it. Not duty and not anything else, but because she locked him out of her pants and--"

"Why doesn't matter," Cooper says, shaking his head and pushing his chair back from the table. "We all got different reasons _why_ , Captain." Kat's eyebrows go up a little bit at the rank, and Racetrack bites her tongue again--CAG's not getting laid tonight. "Doesn't matter. He stayed, he's one of us. He's frakked up, not gonna argue with that. Nobody's gonna argue with that. But he's up here and not back there and he's still in uniform and that's what counts from where I'm standing."

Kat stares at him for a long moment, then looks away. "I've got paperwork."

"I've got to get back to my ship." Dogmeat's voice is as clipped as if he were back at the Academy.

"See you on your next off?" Racetrack asks, hoping he'll take the olive branch. If Peg crew cuts Galactica off for slagging on the Commander, she's going to go crazy from being bored and kill every single person on the ship.

"Don't know. Maybe." Skulls reaches out and slaps him on the back, and Dogmeat relaxes a shade. "Yeah. Probably."

"I'll walk you down to the hangar," Racetrack offers, because sitting in the rec while Kat fumes isn't her idea of a good time.

They get down to the flight deck and he starts pre-flight checks on his Viper while she puts her hands in her pockets and watches. "He _is_ frakked up," Dogmeat says abruptly, staring at his checklist. "The Commander. Real frakked up."

"Yeah," she replies with a shrug. "Who isn't?"

"Gods know _that's_ the truth." He sighs and tosses the checklist aside. "Frak it. Either she flies or she doesn't. I gotta get back to my rack." He turns and nods to her, then reaches out to touch her arm.

"Always together," she says, the closing line of a Scriptural passage that's become as familiar as her own name this last stretch of months. It's like a lifeline between the two crews, a flimsy one made of words that she isn't sure anyone has real faith in anymore. But if real faith wears thin, you can hold on to the trappings. The uniform. The routine. The words.

"Always together," he echoes, stepping back and snapping his collar into place. "Night, Maggie."  
**  
The next day she does a shift in orbit around her planet, her and Skulls. Hanging up there in the sky watching that ugly little rock, her disobedient child, spinning in the black.

She never questioned her decision to stay, not once over the whole year before the Cylons showed up. She belonged in her bird, up in the sky, in the metal belly of Galactica. She stayed because she couldn't imagine anything else.

A lot of the others did question. They second-guessed and third-guessed and most of them wound up going, before the year was over. Most of her friends, most of her officers, an ex-lover or six.

But some of them stayed. Questioning didn't mean much, it was actions that counted. Staying counted no matter why they did it.

 _One of us._

 _Always together._

Shift ends and she gives the order to spin up the FTL, and then that miserable little planet of hers spins just a little further and a signal lights the Raptor up like a hand of the gods...  



End file.
